career development

Working from the comforts of a home office may sounds like a dream come true to most commute-weary professionals – virtual conference calls snuggled up to your pup, no more office-sponsored political coups, and enjoying all that extra time that doesn’t get eaten up by burning rubber back and forth, back, and forth, back and forth.

Ahhhh, heaven.

Transitioning to the ever-growing status of a work from home (WFH) professional can be incredibly liberating; however, like most work transitions, it can require a unique strategy to maximize productivity and keep you from feeling like you live in the office.

Here are three tips to help turn your WFH situation into am empowering career move:

Starting my own business in my early twenties with a laptop, communal Wi-Fi, and student loans, I quickly learned that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know (and I didn’t know anybody).

With limited funds and even less finesse, I struggled to connect with other professionals in my industry. I felt subconscious about my company’s early stage status and was almost convinced no one would ever hire me to market their brand. I knew networking was really important (I mean, it’s in all the business books), but armed with just with a well-worn Target suit, a couple dozen self-printed business cards, and an almost maxed out credit card, I wasn’t exactly positioned to network with the pros, or so I thought.

Few professional communities experience the un- and underemployment rates of today’s military spouses and caregivers.

At present, over 90 percent of military spouses are un-/underemployed, earning a mere fraction of what their civilian counterparts are able to bring in.

As a recently transitioned military spouse, I can attest that the job outlook doesn’t exactly improve when your family moves into the veteran community, especially if you’re tasked with post-war caregiving.

Such realities are the unfortunate plight of many members of the current military community. Some studies cite the ever-growing civilian-military divide, others blame poorly constructed workplace policies as the source of such widespread discrimination.

While I hope the employment struggles of today’s military and veteran families will resolve through effective community and government initiatives, the reality for many military spouses is that they need a job, like, yesterday.

Throughout the majority of my life, I’ve lived with an extreme level of social anxiety – like projectile-vomit-all-over-Brooks-Brother’s-suits-at-an-industry-networking-event level of anxiety.

I love meeting new people in small settings and learning about other’s life stories, but a tech conference filled with abrupt, in-yo-face “Let’s connect!”, “What’s your valuation?”, “Who’s on your client list?” makes me want to ditch the whole event agenda, hole up in my hotel room, and Wikipedia local historical sites.

It’s that bad.

I began my entrepreneurial journey in the era of boom or bust tech-based startups. The markets had crashed, national employment was in the crapper, and this thing called the internet was exploding almost overnight.

The popular business gurus hailed as the poster boys of success were the extremely extroverted, snake oil salesmen peddling “success” to all of us nearly-bankrupt professionals like a crack dealer cruising Beale Street.

Until ten years ago, I had never actually met a professional woman – an educated female that made a living wage. Growing up in fundamentalism, I was raised in a culture that did not acknowledge gender equality and restricted women to very limited roles as wives and mothers. I had no idea what developing a career involved or even how to get started. The majority of my homeschool education had been focused on the domestic arts – childcare, cooking, cleaning, etc. – and neglected subjects like math, science, and finance (all the things you wouldn’t find in the job description for a housewife).

My junior year of college, I finally encountered a real-life professional woman – a visiting professor of biochemistry. She was confident, educated, and owned her own house. I knew I wanted to be just like her, but I had no idea how to get there.

Cultivating supportive mentoring relationships has been a total game changer for my career.

Benefiting from my mentor’s insightful input into all my major professional decisions – both employed and entrepreneurial – has provided much needed encouragement and guidance as I navigate my professional journey.

Finding an experienced mentor that’s a good match can present quite the challenge, especially if you’re a young professional just now building your own network.

Good news: there’s several mentor-matching websites available to millennial professionals for FREE!

If you’re currently seeking a mentor to help guide you along your entrepreneurial career, consider these five mentor matching sites: Continue Reading…

I’m a “Yes” person – it’s been my standing default response to just about anything, even stuff I really didn’t want to do.
​
Here’s just a sampling of the “I’m saying yes but really want to say no but don’t for god knows why” scenarios I’ve found myself in:

“Want to eat grilled alligator for dinner, Hannah?”

Gulp. “Yes,” I meekly respond, silently gagging inside.

“While the semester starts this Monday, we were thinking you could add on an additional three hour course to your teaching schedule. Want to?”

Cringing at the thought of creating an entire new course in 48 hours, I whisper a quasi-confident “Yes.

“I know we agreed on a smaller campaign, but the board decided we wanted something bigger and we want it to start next week. You can do that, right?”

Another (hesitant) but near-automatic “Yes” reply, as I mentally make a list of all the weekend plans I have to cancel to pull off this client’s request.

All I had to do was say “no”, but I didn’t.

Instead, I felt as though there was only one answer I could say, regardless of what I wanted to do or not do – “Yes.”

In 1997, a distinguished surgeon named Don Miguel Ruiz, authored an incredibly inspiring (yet rather small) book that spent over seven years on the New York Times Bestseller List – The Four Agreements.

One of my entrepreneurial mentors recommended the book to me, during a particularly challenging period of growth within my consulting company. Always down for a good read, I immediately ordered the book devoured its golden nuggets of wisdom in one sitting.

While not a very spiritual person at the time (I was raised in extreme fundamentalism, emerged as an atheist as an adult, and eventually found my way back around to New Age spirituality), the impactful concepts of Toltec inspired wisdom shared throughout the book emerged as incredibly applicable to my very millennial career.
​
So here are four ways in which Don Miguel’s Four Agreements impacted my career: Continue Reading…

About Me

Hannah Becker is a Millennial Career, Lifestyle, and Travel Blogger living on a working cattle ranch in Kansas. She’s an MBA Grad, College Professor, and Marketing Consultant that’s a passionate advocate for the needs of family and veteran caregivers. Married to a Military Officer, Hannah is a soon-to-be Mom, modern-day cowgirl, and an avid equestrian.